Small Fish in a Big Pond
by tromana
Summary: Mickey wants to fight the system, but cannot find the words.


**Title: **Small Fish in a Big Pond  
**Author: **tromana  
**Rating: **T  
**Characters: **Mickey  
**Summary: **Mickey wants to fight the system, but cannot find the words.  
**Disclaimer: **I don't own Doctor Who; Big Finish owns my soul.

**Small Fish in a Big Pond**

He had tried to stay there to watch as she ran away to that alien of a man. He would have if he couldn't hear that with every beat of his heart, it was tearing in two. The sound that the box they were leaving in echoed, sounding like it was tearing a hole in time and space, as the Doctor had promised.

He locked the door to his flat, breathless, finally feeling safe. He closed his eyes and the fire, the rage of the creature, the Nestene, was etched into the back of his eyelids. He shook his head, hoping it would pass as he downed a glass of water from a filthy mug. The aftertaste of chlorine and yesterday's coffee was sour in his mouth as he collapsed in front of his computer. He hoped soon that he would finally comprehend that Rose had gone and wouldn't be back any time soon. The good, safe guys were the ones who never won.

Days turned to weeks, weeks to months. Mickey had helped Jackie with the 'Missing' posters, knowing full well that Rose could be anywhere in time and space, literally. The chances were slim but his job alone was enough to distract the nagging thought in the back of his mind that he needed to do something, anything to at the very least try to find her. He'd tried distracting himself in other ways, but the thoughts at the back of his mind always lingered. Was this the man he was without Rose Tyler? Would he be acting the same if he knew she was still somewhere on Earth?

It was exactly 12 weeks and 5 days after Rose had 'disappeared' when he dropped in casually on Jackie to see if there had been even the remotest chance of any news. She glared at him and a police officer beckoned him forward. Mickey cursed himself for not expecting this; he was after all, the last person to see Rose Marion Tyler alive. It was inevitable that the police were eventually going to turn it from being a 'missing persons' case to murder.

He sat there, in the cold dank office trying to find the words. How could he explain that his girlfriend had waltzed off with an older man into an antiquated blue box lifted directly out of the 1950's? He could still picture the fire, the window shop dummies, the liquid alien and the Doctor standing in the middle of it all. Close shaven, leather jacket, piercing blue eyes. His careworn hand slipping around Rose's. Her elation as she ran towards him. Him and his blue box.

Instead, Mickey went at lengths to describe how she had insisted on meeting that nut-job off the internet. How they had parted company, for the police wouldn't believe a wheelie bin had eaten him and replaced him with a plastic replica, only to meet in London city centre. He replaced the blue box that was bigger on the inside with a posh sports car and left it at that. Mickey had even trawled through his computer to find the website Rose had been looking at and printed a picture of the Doctor for them to scrutinise.

It was never enough; they continually questioned him, probing him for details. Accusing him of fabricating tales, that the picture was so grainy it could easily have been a poor photoshop job. Jackie varied from wanting to place a restraining order on him to sobbing on his shoulder for hours at a time.

He couldn't ever relax. Not anymore. Not since she had gone. Clubbing was almost a chore. Women seemed to regard him suspiciously, as if they knew he was that unnamed suspect they had heard of on TV whenever the local, and even once or twice, national news whenever the Tyler case was covered. Their old friends, Shareen, Keisha, the lot of them never stopped questioning him, sometimes even threatening him. "Where's her body?" they'd ask. "Just tell us so we can give poor old Jackie some peace at last." "How could you even think about taking away the one thing she had left?" Drinking himself into a stupor and then dragging himself into work morning after morning always felt like the lesser of two evils.

When he wasn't working, drunk or being pestered by the police, Mickey thought. About Rose, their relationship, just how long she had been in his life. He could remember his Gran dragging him around to the Tyler's place to meet baby Rose. He was forced to carry a bunch of flowers for Jackie and they'd made him sneeze. The woman he clung to who must have been one of Jackie's sisters, or something, at the wedding where Pete had died. How eventually he asked her out, but still couldn't help thinking she had only said yes because she felt sorry for him, and they were mates after all, so there was no reason it couldn't work.

He'd tried to rationalise his experiences shortly before Rose had disappeared. The blob thing he'd seen in a vat that had spoken to him had to be a figment of his imagination. If so, how had he ended up there having been in suburbia minutes beforehand? And there were no words to explain how a box that could appear to fit three people at a squeeze suddenly became spacious and almost alive once inside. There were only so many tricks you could blame on bored kids and the just plain weird students, after all.

Mickey wanted to fight. To scream and shout and rage. He wanted someone to listen to him, to the truth he kept locked out for fear of being marked out as insane. He wanted to beat the system but was lost for words. People walked past him, ignorant to the fact that they'd just lived through an alien invasion. If people could ignore one, just how many thousands could they have turned a blind eye to in the past? He wanted the police to stop bothering him about something unexplainable; he wanted to be able to tell Jackie that the man her daughter had ran off with was an alien. He wanted people to open their eyes and see what was right in front of their noses.

Time marched onwards and it slowly became easier to cope without her. There were places he wouldn't set foot because the memories were still too raw and he had an irrational fear of the London Eye now. Rose's old mates simply ignored him now, resigned to the fact they'd never have an answer to how and why she had disappeared off the face of the Earth. He felt as though he could go out without people staring and slowly he began to smile a little more. Work became more cathartic and therefore more enjoyable. His friends started spending time with him, inviting him to watch the football and hang out a little more.

He still wondered how he would react if he saw Rose again. Would he flip out and scream for the way he's had to live for the past eleven months? Would he hug her and kiss her out of sheer relief that the Doctor-man had brought her back home to him, safe and sound?

Still, most of all, he wanted to hear the sound of the Universe being torn in two as that blue box returned with Rose again.

**end**


End file.
